PREFACE
Genghis Khan, Thomas Jefferson, and God
On an early summer night in 1787, the British historian Edward Gibbon sat in his garden house in Lausanne, where he had retreated to finish writing the last of six massive volumes on the Roman Empire, covering 170 emperors spread over 25 dynasties and 1,500 years, encompassing Europe, Africa, and Asia from the assassination of Julius Caesar on March 15 of the year 44 BC until the fall of Constantine XI to the Turks on May 29, 1453. Gibbon knew more about empires and emperors than any other scholar then or now.
Toward the end of this fifteen-year project, he showed as much interest in the future as in the past as his attention turned from the Mediterranean empires across the Atlantic Ocean to the newly formed American nation destined to become the imperial heir to Rome. Fascinated by the frequently grotesque relationship between power and religion, Gibbon closely followed the heated American debate regarding the place of religion in society, in public life, and in politics. He had been a student at Oxford, where some of these young American rebels had studied. He recognized how radical their ideals were, and how difficult it would be to give them form. Philosophers sometimes mused over the ideal of religious freedom, but no one knew how to create a society that embodied it or to implement laws to enforce religious tolerance. The Americans, led by Thomas Jefferson, were opting to offer citizens total religious freedom and a complete separation of church from state.
Gibbon had acquired his insights into the complicated relationship between power and religion through his education in continental Europe and his service as a member of Parliament. He explored the world’s religions both intellectually and spiritually, having at various points been a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Deist. In his monumental history of the Roman Empire and the foundations of Europe, he carefully charted the ebb and flow of religious currents and persecutions, and he found little to admire. After a lifetime of study, he concluded that one ruler stood above all others in matters of politics and God: Genghis Khan.
Earlier in his career, while writing the initial volumes of his history, Gibbon had shared the prejudices of his time about the Huns, Turks, and Mongols. He was repelled by their savagery and expressed a mild disdain for their leaders, including Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, whom he called “Zingis Khan.” But as he grew older and matured as a scholar, he increasingly saw more to admire in the so-called barbarians than in the civilized rulers of Europe. He wrote that the Roman emperors had been filled with “passions without virtues,” and he denounced their lack of political and spiritual leadership.1 He reflected on the wanton cruelty of the Romans, who first persecuted Christians, then became Christian themselves and persecuted all others.
From his assiduous study of Western history, Gibbon came to believe that Europe offered no sound model for the establishment of religious freedom. “But it is the religion of Zingis that best deserves our wonder and applause,” he boldly asserted in the last volume on the Romans. Gibbon explained that in the Mongol camps different religions lived “in freedom and concord.”2 As long as they would abide by Ikh Yasa, the Great Law, Genghis Khan respected the rights of “the prophets and pontiffs of the most hostile sects.” By contrast, European history had often been shaped by religious fanatics “who defended nonsense by cruelty” and “might have been confounded by the example of a Barbarian, who anticipated the lessons of philosophy, and established by his laws a system of pure theism and perfect toleration.”
Few European scholars were given a chance to evaluate Gibbon’s comments, as his entire work was banned across much of the continent. The Catholic Church inscribed his name and book titles on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Vatican’s list of banned books, thereby making the reading or printing of his books a sin and in many countries a crime. His ideas were too radical, and his books remained on this list of forbidden books until the church finally abolished it in 1966.
In his discussion of Genghis Khan’s career, Gibbon inserted a small but provocative footnote, linking Genghis Khan to European philosophical ideas of tolerance and, surprisingly, to the religious freedom in the newly emerging United States. “A singular conformity may be found between the religious laws of Zingis Khan and Mr. Locke,” Gibbon wrote, and he cited specifically John Locke’s utopian vision in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which Locke had written in 1669 for his employer, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, to govern the newly acquired North American lands south of the Virginia colony.
I first read Gibbon’s remarkable claim while writing Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, a book on the Mongol Empire. The small footnote in Gibbon’s work was but one of the approximately eight thousand footnotes spread throughout his one-and-a-half-million-word history, but it was the one idea that seized my attention. Gibbon was the only historian to link Genghis Khan to my homeland in South Carolina. I found the claim exciting, yet incredible. As much as I wanted to believe Gibbon, the idea seemed too farfetched even for me, an admirer of Genghis Khan and lover of all things Mongol. What possible connection could there be between the founding of the Mongol Empire in 1206 and that of the United States of America almost six hundred years later? I could find no other scholar who took the idea seriously. Nevertheless, I could not let go of this tenuous thread of connection. For my peace of mind, I decided to search for the evidence to support or refute Gibbon’s remark. Did the treasured Western law of religious freedom, embodied in the Constitution of the United States, originate in Asia? Was it a legacy not just of Enlightenment philosophers but also of an illiterate medieval warrior?
I did not realize at the time that the search to answer that question would take me more than twelve years. Writing this one book, inspired by one small footnote in Gibbon’s work, would take me almost as long as it took him to complete the six volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Gibbon recognized that the desire for religious freedom had a strong basis in European thought and society, but the philosophers, idealists, religious dissenters, and politicians disagreed on how to make that into law. Did people first have to believe in God to deserve such freedom? Should there be a national religion controlled by the state? Was religious freedom an individual right or one that should be extended only to established churches? Could an individual refuse to belong to any religion and still be a citizen? Most attempts to shape a law of tolerance at the time focused on a handful of different types of Christian churches. They addressed believers as a community and did not really consider the freedom of an individual to belong or not belong to any religious group.
Following Gibbon, I spent the first few years plowing through the writings of the English philosopher John Locke and his patron Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, and scoured the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, an original handwritten copy of which was kept by the Charleston Library Society, only a few minutes’ walk from my home.3 This idealistic model for society in the Carolina colony offered some civil rights for members of minority sects, but it placed many new limitations on them as well and upheld the Church of England as the official and only true religion. The plan granted limited religious toleration to churches rather than true freedom to individuals, and restricted even that to those sects that supported the government. Despite some general similarities to the overall principle of tolerance of Genghis Khan, I found nothing specific to indicate inspiration—no similarity in wording or reasoning, not even a thin thread with which I could make a link.
Reluctantly, I abandoned the idea that Locke had found inspiration in the laws of Genghis Khan or that my home of South Carolina had been shaped by such ideas. Yet the larger question remained open. Did the Founding Fathers of the United States somehow have access to knowledge about Genghis Khan’s Great Law, and if so, had they copied it? I switched focus from Locke to the American Founding Fathers themselves. I was quickly encouraged by the discovery that Martha Washington had given her husband a novelized biography of Genghis Khan entitled Zingis: A Tartarian History by Anne de La Roche-Guilhem, originally published in French in 1691 and translated into English the following year.4 George Washington kept the book in the library at Mount Vernon, where it remains.
I thought I had struck gold, but it turned out to be fool’s gold. Frustratingly, although this book has been in Washington’s library for more than three hundred years, I could find no evidence that anyone had actually read it. George Washington never mentioned the book, nor could I find in his papers or correspondence any reference to Genghis Khan. I felt so close to the answer, but lacking evidence I feared that I was chasing a myth.
Several years later, my optimism heightened again when I stumbled across evidence that American merchants from Charleston to Boston had imported and sold books on the Mongol leader. In addition to the novel in George Washington’s library, the most popular book in the American colonies in the eighteenth century was The History of Genghizcan the Great, First Emperor of the Ancient Moguls and Tartars, an authoritative and lengthy biography published by the French scholar François Pétis de la Croix in 1710. Benjamin Franklin, a connoisseur of French culture, did much to popularize the book, printing advertisements in his newspaper and selling it by mail order from the post office in Philadelphia for delivery throughout the American colonies.
Who bought these books on Genghis Khan in the 1770s? Who was interested in him, and what happened to those books? Once again, I plunged into Franklin’s voluminous papers and publications looking for elusive evidence of a direct connection between Genghis Khan’s edicts on religious toleration and the decision of the Founding Fathers to give all citizens of their new nation freedom of belief. The Americans, like Genghis Khan, were attempting to invent a new nation unlike any that preceded it. Eighteenth-century American scholars, without an intellectual history of their own, were eager to find models of government and justice from beyond the stagnant pool of Western thought. In the search for something better, they read widely and were particularly intrigued by Asian leaders. But although Franklin seemed to have an opinion about every topic in the world, I could not find anything aside from tantalizing hints at a connection to the Mongols.
A crucial clue came when I discovered that among the founders of the United States, the one who purchased the most copies of Pétis de la Croix’s biography was Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson bought copies of the biography in the original French language for himself and offered them as gifts for others. He inscribed the copy he presented to his granddaughter, Cornelia Jefferson Randolph, as a seventeenth birthday gift, urging that she study it.5 One of his copies of the biography of Genghis Khan entered the United States Library of Congress, and another was placed in the library of the University of Virginia; Jefferson was the founder of both. As late as May 26, 1795, in a letter to Parisian bookseller Jean François Froullé, Jefferson was ordering still another copy of the Genghis Khan biography and requesting that the book “be packed in a good trunk, covered with leather, or rather with sealskin.”6
I cautiously examined a photocopy of one of the Genghis Khan biographies owned by Jefferson. The book emphasized Genghis Khan’s religious tolerance and reproduced a text of the Mongolian Law of Religious Freedom, which Pétis de la Croix had stressed was the first law of Genghis Khan. As presented in this biography, the Mongol law was a general law offering freedom, in very simple words, for everyone of every faith. In 1777, one year after drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson translated its lofty words into specific legislation when he composed America’s first law of religious freedom for his native state of Virginia. He had embraced the idea of religious freedom before reading about Genghis Khan, but what he found in the biography was a specific way to translate the desire for religious freedom into law. Religious freedom was an individual right, not a prerogative of the church.
Mongol law forbade anyone “to disturb or molest any person on account of religion.”7 Similarly, Jefferson’s law prescribed “that no man shall . . . suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief.” Genghis Khan’s law insisted “that everyone should be left at liberty to profess that which pleased him best.” Jefferson’s law echoed this in the statement “that all men shall be free to profess . . . their opinions in matters of religion.” The First Law of Genghis Khan and the Virginia statute were both similar in spirit to, but different in wording from, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
The Mongol Empire encompassed people from a greater diversity of faiths than that of any other empire in prior history. Never had one man ruled over followers of so many religions without belonging to one of them: Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Confucians, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Hindus, Jews, Christians, and animists of different types. Each of the major religions was divided into myriad competing, and often viciously warring, sects. Genghis Khan’s greatest struggle in life was not to conquer so many tribes, cities, and nations—that had come fairly easily to him—but to make them live together in a cohesive society under one government.
In 1997 I began research on the Secret History of the Mongols, attempting to locate all the episodes in the manuscript and to evaluate the text based on an analysis of the places where the events unfolded within Mongolia and across China and Central Asia. The first year, I thought that I would complete the work in a single summer, then in two summers, in order to trace the conquests from Karakorum to the Balkans. But now, after nearly two decades, the work continues, by foot, camel, horse, or four-wheel drive. I began alone, but gradually the project expanded to include a team of dedicated Mongolian scholars as well as nomadic herders who contributed their unique knowledge of the area to the project. Over time the scope expanded from only the events of Genghis Khan’s life into areas such as northern Burma, conquered by the Mongols after Genghis Khan, and the remains of the Khmer Empire, which was never conquered by the Mongols but developed a working relationship with the Great Khans. The latter phase of the research goes well beyond the Secret History, but still it remains my guide.
The horror of the Mongol conquests is well-documented in books and films, but Genghis Khan’s role as a religious lawmaker remains largely unexplored. Late in life he drew religious leaders from far and wide to his camp in his struggle to create a lasting peace among competing religions whose belligerent animosities plagued humanity. What began as a personal struggle to find his own spiritual core gradually became a quest to understand the role of religion in society. The more he considered the laws and attributes of the different warring sects, the more he came to believe that no empire could be stable so long as men were allowed to kill or be killed for their faith.
The influence of Genghis Khan in the modern world was far wider and deeper than I had previously imagined, and this realization spurred me to write this second book. From the beginning of my research I recognized, but did not truly understand, the importance of Genghis Khan’s spirituality and his unusual approach to religion. The transmission of ideas and beliefs is much harder to trace than the spread of technological innovations such as the printing press, gunpowder, or the compass. Only now, after nearly two decades spent researching the life of Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, do I feel ready to tentatively offer my findings.
I wrote this book largely at the behest of Walker Pearce, my wife of forty-four years, who felt that my earlier work ignored the rich and unique spiritual life of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. She named the book. Although I read the manuscript to her as I wrote it, and she had a clearer vision than I did of what it would become, she did not live to see the book completed. I was greatly encouraged and guided in finishing the book by my editor Joy de Menil, and I benefited from additional editorial assistance from Stephanie Hunt in Charleston.
The ideas of Genghis Khan were revolutionary in the thirteenth century, when he lived, and in the eighteenth century, when the founders of America rediscovered him, and they remain so today. He faced many of the same problems we face in a global society where religious pluralism often results in polarity and conflict. How should one balance freedom of belief with the actions of fanatics? What happens when such fanatics break free of civic control to become masters of the society? How can followers of one religion be prevented from attacking those of another? How can competing religions, each claiming to be the only true one, be compelled to live harmoniously in society? What are the limits of religion? Genghis Khan’s quest to answer these questions remains as urgent today as it was eight hundred years ago.